Make private cloud your competitive differentiator

When I think about cloud technology, I tend to put customers into 3 buckets.

Companies which have embraced the cloud

Companies in the planning stages of embracing the cloud

Companies whose leaders are thinking about how the cloud is going to help them deliver their business outcomes

The reality is that the cloud is here, and it is making a huge difference in how businesses deliver their goods, regardless of whether we are talking about tangible goods, services or information. While some companies were early adopters of cloud and transitioned directly to public clouds, there are some owners which feel that managing charges and data has not been completely without issues. Whether you chose public, private or multicloud, I am in the camp that believes that most companies will eventually go to multicloud. It will enable them to use the right environment for the right data at the right time, even if they don’t quite realize it yet. This brings me to my thoughts for today.

IBM recently announced a series of storage products and solutions which embrace the multicloud environment. IBM Storage provides a trusted foundation to protect, secure and move data-driven business information between public, private and hybrid clouds across all of our solution offerings through efficient integration with multicloud environments. For example, enhancements to IBM Spectrum Protect enable our customers to easily protect their data on premises or in the cloud. Another is the ability to unlock secondary data value by re-using data copies for new revenue-generating applications. Imagine harnessing the power of your data to differentiate your solutions from your competition, delivering measurable business impact from data you already have. And the beauty of it all is that you can use these copies regardless of which cloud or data center they reside in. Imagine bringing multicloud to the security and resiliency of the mainframe and more. Check out our announcement blog here to get more details.

Now let’s get back to my thoughts for today, delivering IBM Storage Solutions to our customers. During this same announcement highlighting our new IBM FlashSystem 9100, we also announced two new IBM Storage solutions:

First off, we are making a significant announcement around our current solution called IBM Storage Solutions for IBM Cloud Private. It is a pre-tested, validated solution that allows you to deploy a complete private cloud stack in hours instead of the typical days, weeks or months required if you try it on your own. This announcement highlights our expansion of the blueprint adding support for IBM Z, the trusted foundation for enterprise digital experiences. IBM’s Z platform is an extremely robust, secure and scalable IT platform available for your private cloud needs, delivering 99.999 percent and better application availability. In addition to incredible resiliency, the IBM Z prevents data breaches 8.4x more effectively than competitors and increases workload capacity by up to 600 percent. These are great specifications for any enterprise looking to build the ultimate private cloud environment as they move to modernize their applications for the future. Add this new compute platform to our newly launched FlashSystem 9100 and our incredibly fast and DS8000 family, and you have the most reliable, complete integrated and validated private cloud platform stack available today. All of the ingredients are measured out, pre-tested, and validated to deliver, courtesy of IBM Spectrum Access Blueprint for IBM Cloud Private.

Secondly, for those of you looking to drive down upfront CAPEX and monthly OPEX costs from your business or about to invest in a VDI environment, our new IBM FlashSystem 9100 has recently completed testing in a VMware VDI environment. Testing was scaled to an initial 1000 seats with deployments built to handle multiple 1000 seat increments. Delivering best practices, this newly-announced FlashSystem 9100 all-flash array delivers flexible, modern, agile, NVMe-optimized storage built with IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM FlashCore technologies.

“The new IBM FlashSystem 9100 storage systems from IBM are what the marketplace has been waiting for,” states Ed Walsh, General Manager, IBM Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure. “They have NVMe-inside, dedupe and hardware-accelerated compression, 3D-TLC density, all of the advantages that IBM FlashCore technology brings, plus a long list of software-defined and modern data protection Spectrum Storage solutions for today’s data driven multi-cloud enterprise. What an enterprise data storage system should be has just been redefined.”

Whether it’s IBM’s FlashSystem 9100 for your new VDI environment or the rock-solid duo of IBM Z and IBM DS8000 storage as the foundation for your private cloud, IBM is here to ensure that cloud technologies can be leveraged to augment your business, elevating you and your business dreams above the crowd. Take some time out of your busy schedule and spend a few minutes reading these posts to learn more about our new storage solutions. Once you do, I am confident that you will join other IBM customers who are already experiencing these new solutions as they move to the cloud, enhance their VDI environment and meet the other challenges out there as you move through this data-driven, multicloud world.

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